Ben
Matthews has
“just a few questions,” , about World
War II

Just a few questions. . .

HAVE you heard of the OSS spy stationed in the Vatican, codenamed ‘Black”? I am curious as to his identity, and I was made aware of him after reading a book called US Intelligence and the Nazis. I have met two of its authors, Richard Breitman, one of whose lectures I attended about three years ago, and Norman Goda, one of my former professors.

After reading your books on Churchill, and on Dresden,
I wondered if Churchill could have cited two precedents for terror bombing of civilians; the first would have been Nazi air strikes against Poland in 1939, and the second the bombing of Rotterdam in May 1940.

I do not know the death toll for Rotterdam, and none of these early incidents compared to the loss of life in the terror bombings of the last years of the war, and they were not directed at England, but they still count as terror bombing, in my book, and they killed a lot of civilians.

I believe Poland was hit harder, but I could be wrong.
Also, after watching an interview you did about your upcoming Heinrich Himmler book, in which you say that the Nazis were not going to play nice with Jews or anyone else because Germany was being mercilessly bombed, could you not say the same for the Soviet Union, and how it was obviously not going to treat the Germans well, given the nature of the war being waged in Eastern Europe?

The Nazi treatment of Soviet POWS inevitably led to similar treatment of German POWs in Red Army hands. I think it goes both ways.

Ben
Matthews